Johannes Itten was born in Südern-Linden, where he was educated at the method of Frobel. He was trained at the Art Academy in Geneva but returned to Bern because he wasn’t impressed by the Geneva trainers. In Bern he got some lessons from Eugene Gilliard, an abstract painter. Between 1919 and 1922 Itten gave les at the Bauhaus. He later published the book “Art and Colour” that describes his ideas about the particular composition and colour, based on the colour wheel of Adolf Hölzel. Itten also made a colour wheel: The Colour Wheel of Itten.
The colour wheel of Itten is based on the subtractive coloursytem. Itten has as primary colours red, yellow and blue. The secondary colours are orange, green and violet. There are also tertiary colours that occurs if you mixed the colours of primary and secondary.
If you look at the colour wheel you see in the middle the three primary colours: red, yellow and blue. If you mixed the colour you get a new colour:
Red – yellow = orange
Yellow – blue = green
Blue – red = violet
And so you get secondary colours. If you mixed a primary colour with a secondary colour you get again a new colour:
Red – violet = pink (or light purple)
Violet – blue = dark blue
Blue – green = light blue
Green – yellow = light green
Yellow – orange = light orange
Orange – red = dark orange
Probably you think now: “he that isn’t right there are twelve tertiary colours and here they says six.” If you very good look to the picture you see that there in the outer circle primary and secondary colours are too.
So in real the colour wheel of Itten isn’t quite true.
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| here you see the primary colours |
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| here you see the secondary colours |
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here you see the tertiary colours but
also you see primary and secondary
colours!!! |